The Commentariat -- Oct. 5, 2013
"In this week's address, President Obama said that Republicans in the House of Representatives chose to shut down the government over a health care law they don't like. He urged the Congress to pass a budget that funds our government, with no partisan strings attached. The President made clear he will work with anyone of either party on ways to grow this economy, create new jobs, and get our fiscal house in order for the long haul -- but not under the shadow of these threats to our economy." -- White House
Blackmail, extortion, hostage-taking and brinksmanship are the tools of terrorists, not legislators. -- Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution
We Have No Idea What We're Doing. Lori Montgomery, et al., of the Washington Post: "House Republicans on Friday continued to demand changes to President Obama's signature health-care law as a condition for funding government operations.... Privately, a number of GOP lawmakers are pushing for a shift ... to exploration of a broader deal to reduce the nation's debt.... But Boehner seemed anything but conciliatory when he and other senior Republican lawmakers appeared before reporters on Friday, angrily denouncing comments from an anonymous White House official who said the Democrats were 'winning' in the funding impasse. 'This isn't some damn game,' Boehner said loudly.... [See video clip in yesterday's Commentariat.] President Obama sought to correct the official's comment when he spoke to reporters Friday during a visit with Vice President Biden to Taylor Gourmet, a deli near the White House.... 'As long as they're off the job, nobody's winning, and that's the point,' Obama said in response to a question, referring to furloughed federal workers. 'We should get this over with as soon as possible.'"
... We Admit We Have No Idea What We're Doing. Jonathan Weisman & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "The overarching problem for [Boehner]..., say allies and opponents, is that he and his leadership team have no real idea how to resolve the fiscal showdown. They are only trying to survive another day, Republican strategists say, hoping to maintain unity as long as possible so that when the Republican position collapses, they can capitulate on two issues at once -- financing the government and raising the debt ceiling -- and head off any internal party backlash." ...
You really have to call Cruz, I'm not even joking about that. That's really what you have to do, because he's the one that set up the strategy, he's the one that got us into this mess, and so we've got to know what the next move is. -- Dave Nunes (R-Calif.), when asked what the House was doing
... Michael Bender of Bloomberg News: "U.S. Representative Dennis Ross, a Florida Republican, said he would support a broad spending deal that didn't include changes to the health-care law, becoming the first Tea Party-backed House lawmaker to publicly back off the fight that has shut down the government for five days. Ross, ranked among the House's most conservative members..., said he shifted his position because the shutdown hasn't resulted in changes to the Affordable Care Act, which started Oct. 1, the same day government funding ran out. The shutdown also could hurt the party, he said." CW: I guess the old folks in Lakeland & Plant City are letting Ross know how fearful they are that President Obama will personally confiscate their Social Security checks if the shutdown goes on. ...
... Greg Sargent: "Dems have hit on a way to use a 'discharge petition,' which forces a House vote if a majority of Representatives signs it, to try to force the issue. Previously, it was thought this could not work, because a discharge petition takes 30 legislative days to ripen, so if this were tried with the clean CR that passed the Senate, this couldn't bear fruit until some time in November. But now House Democrats say they have found a previously filed bill to use as a discharge petition -- one that would fund the government at sequester levels.... Dems say that if they get enough signatures, they'd be able to force a vote by October 14th." ...
... CW: Various political scientists (here & here, ferinstance), are saying that the plan won't work, largely because few Republicans will sign on to a Democratic discharge petition even if they favor the Democrats' position. However, these experts assume the House leadership would be weakened by the defection & would therefore oppose it. I'm not sure they're right. Boehner knows he is going to have to work with Pelosi on this somewhere down the line; this would be an ideal way for him to get the CR through with no visible blood on his hands. It would not surprise me if Boehner was in on the Democratic plan. He retains his creds with the Crazy Caucus & gets the clean CR he wants. Perfecto. ...
... Jonathan Chait: "... a negotiation is not a shakedown. Pretending the two are the same doesn't make it so." ...
... Molly Ball of the Atlantic: "Friday's campaign-style back-and-forth over who said what and who cares more about the suffering American people during the shutdown started with an anonymous senior administration official's declaration, quoted and paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal, that "'We are winning .... It doesn't really matter to us' how long the shutdown lasts "because what matters is the end result.'" [See also the top of the October 3 Commentariat.] ... For all the accusations of gloating hurled at the White House..., I heard something very different from senior administration officials Thursday: an awareness that Obama doesn't have to get elected again, and that that has freed him to take politically risky positions in the service of dragging the American political system out of chaotic and destabilizing patterns. As senior administration officials portrayed it, Obama has been working throughout the course of this year to rightsize the presidency." ...
... ** "The Triumph of the Ratfuckers." Charles Pierce ties the House teabaggers to Nixon plumber Donald Segretti. ...
... ** Colbert King of the Washington Post goes back further in history to locate the ideological foundations of the Tea Party saboteurs: "Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.... The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy's instigated Civil War. Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad -- all in the name of 'fiscal sanity.'" ...
... MEANWHILE, if you stick with Right Wing News, here's what you're learning. Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller: "Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown." The post is worth a read for the shear audacity of it. And don't think members of Congress -- Eric Cantor, Ted Cruz -- aren't fully exploiting this fabrication. ...
... AND, Speaking of Ted. Igor Bobic of TPM: "Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), or 'the joint speaker of the House' as Harry Reid calls him, argued Friday that Republicans have already offered Democrats a concession in their stand against reopening the government by demanding not a full repeal of Obamacare, but merely the defunding" ObamaCare.
** Gail Collins: "Over the past few years, Republicans have terrified their most fervent followers about Obamacare in order to disguise the fact that they no longer knew what to say about their old bête noir, entitlements.... Not so very long ago, worrying about entitlements was central to Republican identity. Then, they began to notice that the folks at their rallies looked like the audience for 'Matlock' reruns. The base was aging, and didn't want to change Social Security or Medicare.... It's not easy leading a political movement that believes the federal government is at the core of all our problems while depending heavily on the votes of citizens who get both their retirement money and health care from the federal government." ...
... Ezra Klein & Evan Soltas of the Washington Post: The ObamaCare site sucks, & not just because it can't handle a lot of traffic. ...
... Arit John of the Atlantic: "Web developers, or at least people who know that Unix and OS X share the same lineage, took to Reddit to ridicule the coding errors plaguing the newly-launched Obamacare exchange websites this week."
Serge Kovaleski of the New York Times: "The mother of Aaron Alexis, the military contractor who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last month, told his bosses one month before the shootings that he had a history of paranoid episodes and most likely needed therapy. But Mr. Alexis' managers at the Experts Inc., an information technology firm, decided to keep him on the job and did not require him to seek treatment, an internal company investigation has found."
News Ledes
Reuters: "A U.S. Navy SEAL team is believed to have killed a senior leader of the al Shabaab militant group in a raid on his seaside villa in Somalia on Saturday in response to a deadly attack on a Nairobi shopping mall last month, the New York Times reported. The unidentified target was believed to have been killed in a predawn firefight after the SEAL team landed in the Somali town of Barawe by sea...."
AFP: "Tunisia's political rivals agreed Saturday on a timetable for the unpopular Islamist-led ruling coalition to quit and be replaced by a government of independents, aiming to end a festering political crisis.... Saturday's deal, signed in the presence of politicians and media, was brokered to end a simmering two-month crisis sparked by the assassination in July of opposition MP Mohamed Brahmi."
Times Picayune: "New Orleans native, former Black Panther and member of the Angola Three Herman Wallace died Thursday night because of complications from liver cancer, friends and counsel confirmed Friday morning."
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Reader Comments (10)
Obamacare site isn't working. I'll bet the Feds aren't responsible for the glitches; I'll bet the Feds aren't running the system. So, who's the sub running the system? ADP, CSC? These contractors have a long history of fucking up before finally getting it more-or-less right.
@James Singer: I won't go into the bias inherent in a WSJ report where one of the two authors works for the American Enterprise Institute, but you are right that the work was subcontracted out. According to the writers, "Even then the agency was slow to outsource key contracts and turned to what insiders say were not top-quality programmers."
A more positive article, written in June by Alex Howard of the Atlantic: "The people that helped to build the new Healthcare.gov are unusual: Instead of some obscure sub-contractor in a nameless office park in northern Virginia, the site was iteratively created by a cross-disciplinary team of developers and editors at HHS, and contractors at Teal Design, Edward Mullen Studio, and Development Seed, a scrappy startup in a garage in the District of Columbia." This article is quite detailed.
Marie
BTW, I understand that the ACA sign-up website is full of errors. However, I remind you all that the Medicare start-up was pronounced a DISASTER, and it was one year after the program started that it took off. (That, of course, was before the computer generation.)
Zeke Emmanuel said on Bill Maher tonight that it would take at least six months before we would begin to see how the ACA (NO, it is not called "Obamacare") enrollment is going. That sounds about right to me. How in the name of Jeebus can the Feds (or anyone) get such a huge program up and rolling without thousands of glitches? And such an overload of Faux Newz acolytes?
Also on Bill Maher tonight--a pathetic Tea Partier named Matt Kibbe. Poor lad. He shoulda stayed home. His counterpart on the panel was (TA-DA) Alan Grayson, D-FL)--my favorite congressman of the moment, with his whacked out Amurican flag tie. He, and special guest, Carl Reiner--the noted comedian and writer--dismembered this asswipe so quickly and seamlessly, that they did not break a sweat.
Bottom line: the Tea Party is bringing down the good-old-boy network in the Republican Party, but only dummies, crazies and low-information voters buy into their nuttiness. If it were not so scary, it would be really, really funny!
Memo to Obama: Hold tight and keep the faith! Craziness eventually manifests in completely unacceptable ways. And most of us, believe it or not, are not very crazy.
ACA computer glitches: because it's a computer and you have one in your house, you see a problem. With Social Security and Medicare it was paper in an office and you didn't see the glitches. Take a deep breath and cool out. The speedy feedback loop of computers can be their greatest downfall. I've never felt the frustration at the card catalog as I have at the computer. But I get over it.
The Colbert King article is perfect. I don't see any light between the anarchists of the Tea sort and fundamentalists of the Republican sort and the regular old rebels of the south (or their equivalents elsewhere). These guys are too often proud of their intractable thick-headedness and only understand brute force. These are the same people who came up with the line "don't speak ill of the dead". Because even when they are gone, there is still nothing good worth noting about their existence. And deep down, they know it.
Complete with pictures and quotes, a piece in The Atlantic on the 32 Congressional "hardliners" behind the shutdown. They're a completely despicable bunch. McClintock is the only one I have personal knowledge about. He represents a district 100s of miles north of where he lives (in my district). He couldn't even vote because of residency requirements. McClintock's picture is in the dictionary beside "carpetbagger". In several campaigns he railed against paying retirement for public employees and vowed on the heart of Baby Jesus that he would never take his pension from his state legislator days. You guessed it, he takes the retirement pension. He directed a Bee writer to "talk to Mrs. McClintock about that."
Its quite a collection of vile and ignorant misfits. Except for the women, they're mostly butt ugly too.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/32-republicans-who-caused-the-government-shutdown/280236/
After reading Pierce who cites numerous insults by the "ratfuckers" he said that in an interview between Carol Costello and Rep. Todd Rokita he told her "to sit there and look pretty." I thought, wow! and how did Ms Costello respond to that? I found the video of this exchange along with the transcript. Here is what was written:
"“I don’t know if you have children yet, I’m sure you don’t have grandchildren yet, you look much too young, but we’re fighting for them,” Rokita said. “Carol, do you have any idea how much this law is going to cost?”
Costello sharply replied: “Do you know how much it costs every day the government is partially shut down? You’re costing taxpayers millions and millions of dollars!”
This is exactly what Rokita said in the video––never using the word "beautiful" as the headline asserted, but his statements could be implied, as Pierce suggested (did he suggest or was he misquoting?) that Carol should just sit there and look pretty. However Carol did not come back immediately with quote the article's transcript claimed. What she said was, "Thank you"––––REALLY???? THANK YOU?
So my rant here is twofold: Be responsible in presenting exchanges and please, all the Carols on the TEEVEE, especially those with golden tresses, don't fall for bullshit compliments when you are being fucked over by bullshit artists.
I now yield the remainder of my time.
Listened last night to Gil Scott-Heron's "Watergate Blues" and had a deja vu moment of the first order.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh3bgPJ4dBs
@ Diane: Thank you for the Atlantic link––it's quite a lot of fun to match those deep, carefully thought out, outright fabrications to faces. I disagree about the physicality, you called them "butt ugly"–– of the women featured. If you didn't know who they were and what they stood for you might just want to invite them over for barbecue or brownies––they LOOK like attractive people, I think. But then, what do I know––I thought Janet Reno had a certain salubriousness about her that was appealing, but no one agreed with me.
@PDP: I, too followed Diane's link to The Atlantic. And, while I dislike both Michele and Marsha, Marsha, Marsha...I concur (mumble, mumble) they are physical attractive.
But, then I began reading some of the comments following the article. There was DigDug2K who included: " ...I'm sick of the press acting like Boehner is stuck cowtailing to these guys because if he does he might lose his speakership."
Followed by Augustus-Fink_Nottle's query: "...Cowtailing? Is that like kowtowing?"
Now I'm on a mission. Head over to Google. Was cowtailing really a word...AND what does it mean? Yes, it is. "Cowtailing: a coarse wool of poor quality" (often from the area between the hindquarters). Which, gets a delightful interpretation as follows:
Weighing in, one CapitaineDeLaPalice added, "It's not hard to imagine how the idea of being completely subservient to the point of prostration (kowtowing) could be confused with constantly being stuck to an animal's ass (cowtailing?)"
Spot on mon Capitaine!
Which led me to discover another new word. Eggcorn. Huh??
(It came into usage in 2003): The phenomenon is very similar to the form of wordplay known as the pun, except that, by definition, the speaker (or writer) intends the pun to have some humorous effect on the recipient, whereas one who speaks or writes an eggcorn is unaware of the mistake.
I guess I wasn't very clear. My point was the women are not butt ugly, but the men are..... Of course they all have butt ugly souls...or perhaps black holes where their souls are supposed to be. I'm sure that colors my view. After all I think my beloved Ms. Frida, a wrinkled, jowly bulldog who snorts, farts and has little ambition for anything but sleep and food is the epitome of gorgeous.